Abstract

This dissertation explores the close, yet conflicted, affinity between the thought of Baruch Spinoza and Martin Heidegger concerning the issue of human freedom. While Heidegger remained relatively silent about Spinoza's thought, their respective conceptions of human freedom as 'will-less' and 'subject-less' and not distinct from natural necessity remain quite similar. Such similarity, however, is not merely structural . Heidegger's conception of human freedom occurs in a lineage which finds its modern philosophical beginnings in the thought of Spinoza. ;The concrete, historical link between the thought of Spinoza and Heidegger is the nineteenth-century German Idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling. Schelling takes up Spinoza's conception of human freedom in his text of 1809 On The Essence of Human Freedom. In this text, Schelling both appropriates Spinoza's thinking and radically departs from it . In his 1936 lecture course on Schelling's 'Freedom-Text', Heidegger interprets Schelling's thinking in a manner quite akin to Spinoza's thinking; he attempts to think freedom, in its concomitance with natural necessity, otherwise than merely as a product of the 'will' and of transcendental subjectivity. ;Yet, although Heidegger's conception of human freedom is informed by Spinoza's thinking, significant differences remain. Heidegger's conception of love , as the manifestation of human freedom, amounts to a unifying and teleological movement which gathers together singular human desires. In sharp contrast to Spinoza, who regards singular desires as the constitutive form of human freedom, the movement of love in Heidegger's thinking appears as an abstracting force which does not let singular human desires occur as singular human desires. In this way, the conception of human freedom in Heidegger's Schelling-interpretation admits of transcendence whereas Spinoza's conception remains determined solely by the ever-changing movement of this world